About Me
BIO: J. Otis Powell! works as a poet (writer), media producer, performance artist, producer and curator of performance events, arts administrator, an educator & a consultant. Powell!’s current and ongoing projects include working as a curator for Bridges – a performance art initiative with Pangea World Theater. Working with The Ways Ensemble – a multidisciplinary artist collective. Serving as an editor and roster artist for the Givens Foundation.
He is presently completing a novel titled Bottomless Sky.His poetry has been published in two books of his own work: THEOLOGY (Traffic Street Press) & My Tongue Has No Bone (Porter Publishing), and numerous anthologies and magazines including: ache Magazine, RUMINATOR Review, DrumVoices, Siren, Futures Magazine, The Drumming Between Us, Collage, Hungry Mind Review, A Definitive Guide To the Twin Cities, A View from the Loft, Colors Magazine, The Artist's Voice, the Star Tribune, Insight News, Air Check, Public Art Review, Art Paper, The North Coast Review, Performance Twin Cities, the Arts Midwest Jazzletter, Twin Cities Jazznotes, Powderhorn Writer’s Fescitival Broadside Project, The Critical Stage and Critical Conditions.AWARDS + ACCOMPLISHMENTS: J. Otis has been the recipient a Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, two Jerome Mid Career Artists Grants and a Intermedia Arts Interdisciplinary McKnight Fellowship. He was a founding producer on the award winning Write On Radio!, the Twin Cities literary connection, at KFAI-FM in Minneapolis, he also worked as Communities’ Liaison & Program Director for Interdisciplinary Collaborations at The Loft Literary Center, the nation's most comprehensive independent literary organization. Also among the awards and honors that Powell! has received for his work are: Silver Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You from the Pensacola Press Club, Gold Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You Pensacola Press Club, listed in Who’s Who in Black America, A Juneteenth Poetry Award in, selected as a presenter in the Good Thunder Series at Mankato State, selected as a Visiting Scholar for University Center Rochester & A Special Merit Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters as a producer of Write On Radio!.His words have also been recorded, to date, on five CDs: THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution , Words Will Heal The Wound, an anthologies produced for National Poetry Month and THIS CAT IS OUT, in association with The New Day Blues Band, Unsentimental with Rene Ford, and FILHO D’AGUA with percussionist Eliezer Freitos Santos. Recently he co produced a Digital Visual Disk with Bill Cottman titled News as Abstract Truth.J. Otis publishes in mid air as well through performances with ensembles such as STIGMATISM World Ensemble, Afrika’s Ensemble, Revolutionary Hearts, SIRIUS B, OGU, NOW!, tHE eDGE eNSEMBLE, The New Day Blues Band, IMP ORK, Tribo, and DRUMMING WORDS/SPOKEN HEARTS. As a producer: Creator, writer and producer of Sketches of You, a weekly arts television magazine and writer, narrator and associate producer of MAKING A STEP, an on the road documentary of the Mighty Clouds of Joy, both for WSRE-TV in Pensacola FL.J. Otis worked as researcher and segment producer for RESEARCH JOURNAL, a T.V. series, at Rarig Center for the University of Minnesota. He conceived, wrote and produced a performance arts show titled THE GODS MUST BE PIMPS, in a series for Intermedia Arts. Other stage productions include Holy Ghosts Dance, at Red Eye, SEAMLESS, at the Southern Theater, THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution, a CD recording and a performance arts event at Studio 6A in Hennepin Center for the Arts & at the Knitting Factory in New York City
